Well, yeah. Apparently not as simple as it sounds.
I did a small amount of searching, didn't find much, and decided to write my own wiki markup parser. That got old really fast and I decided that I should find something else to do it for me. I found parsewiki. It did the job... sort of. Its support for complex wiki markup is limited, and my Perl skills are insignificant enough that I couldn't do a lot more than fiddle with regexes.
So ok, I needed to use a larger, more mature piece of wiki software, with a more sophisticated parser. MoinMoin and MediaWiki were the two big ones that popped into my mind, but looking at the code of their parsers (and a number of other wikis), it became obvious that hacking the parser functionality out of them was not realistic.
I figured, well, I could always just paste my stuff into a wiki in a browser and then steal the html it gave me -- but that is way too much work. This needs to be something I can script. Then curl popped into mind, and I started to hack up a script which would take my wiki markup, send it to Wikipedia via curl, and then parse out the html I wanted. It worked! But alas, this was extremely evil. I couldn't abuse Wikipedia in such a way. I needed to run a wiki on my own machine, and do the same thing with it -- but I hate setting up and running big complex dynamic web apps.
Then someone pointed me towards MoinMoin DesktopEdition -- it was perfect! I can just untar it, run it, and bam -- a running local wiki! So I modified my script to work with Moin instead of MediaWiki, but Moin was giving me 403s (something "knew" I wasn't using a browser, and was trying to prevent abuse, I think), and then complaining about locks on pages and whatnot. I didn't even need to submit or save anything to the wiki; I just needed the "preview" functionality -- so I needed to get around Moin's paranoia. A couple simple hacks accomplished that:
Basically you just grab the MMDE tarball, unpack it, apply these tiny tweaks,
and then run python moin.py whenever you need it running. It starts up
on localhost:8080. Simple.
Here is my script that submits to Moin and parses the generated html back out:
I use a little wrapper script for calling it:
And this is the html template I use for incise.org:
(now I just use a full moin installation for my site)